Iz a Newsletter #1

Hi welcome to the new newsletter, better than the old newsletter. Or perhaps of equivalent quality, with more Iz puns. Who can say.

IZ AN UPDATE: 

I’m going to be at Readercon in approximately…..four hours? I am living the sort of life where I decided to go to Readercon two days before Readercon, so you know how it is with spaghetti. If you’re there and say hi to me, it will make me go O_O but also I will give you a sticker.

I’m in a bunch of anthologies! You should check em out, preorder if you can, etc, on account of I've seen the proofs for all of 'em and they're fantastique. Can you guess what stuff is in each? That's right. You can't (Actually, you probably can).

Afterlives: The Year's Best Death Fiction 2023 - edited by Vajra Chandrasekera

The Year's Best Fantasy Volume 3 - edited by Paula Guran

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 - edited by John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey

I have nothing new to offer you other than that. But watch this space.

WHAT IS IZ READING:

Not to flip you to a different newsletter, but this month, my short fiction reading reccs are going to be in WYRMHOLE MAGAZINE on July 15, where me and the boys (the boys being a bunch of other short fiction writers experiencing our twenties) are starting a magazine. The mid-month editions are paywalled, but the first-of-the-month editions are free to read. Join me in the hole.  

Bookswise, I'm currently reading The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel, which was sitting on my bookshelf for about six months before I got around to actually picking it up. This is pretty much par for the course. I'm really enjoying it - think bodymod cyberpunk dystopia meets baseball meets detective thriller. I'm also reading the House of God, by Samuel Shem, which isn't SFF but I'd pitch as sort of Catch 22 meets medical residency.

Next on my list is Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, which came out like...a month ago (?) and I'm super excited to read.

IZ CONTENT: SO THE 7 FIGURE BOOK DEAL, HUH? SO THE TV OPTION, HUH? IZ WHAT IZ YOU DOING?

I've decided what the people really want with newsletters is to get really god damn parasocial. So I'm going to do a series over...probably the next year, that describes how we get to "Isabel gets a seven figure book deal for her debut novel," because jesus christ. I'm going to run this section chronologically through time, so all the interesting bits are going to be later.

Instead, we must begin at the beginning: Isabel How Did You Get Your Agent (Part 1-3):

Skip to the next newsletter if you want my actual query process and the tools I used - this is the actually helpful stuff, today's installment is just verbosity for the sake of verbosity.

My agent (Steven Salpeter, hi Steven) sometimes says things like “stop comparing yourself to people online/the journeys of people online” unfortunately I am a chronic person who does not listen to other people (sorry, Steven), and I read five zillion “how I got my agent” stories while getting my agent.

So. This is the five zillionth and oneth story, for the other parasocial fucks out there. This is mostly just a letter to the guy I was ten years ago, who needed to know how to be a person who does things in the world.

And for those of you who like to read tea leaves, if there’s any message here, it is that you can be talented and you can be lucky, and while the luck is necessary and crucial and important, you must have the talent, you have to be working on your shit to be poised for the luck to strike. IE: If you are lucky, there will be a moment in your life when someone asks "Do you have anything for me to read?" or you can confidently ask "Can I send you something to take a look at?" and to do either of these things: you must have something to show them. The first time this happened to me, I ended up signing with Steven. The second time, I sold SUBLIMATION.

Or to put it succinctly: heartbreaking news; beautiful writers, you must be writing.

part 1: how I got into writing

Kid grows up in a house filled with books and chooses to spend some recesses in the library reading; kid gets really good at Accelerated Reader quizzes because she likes to win; kid fucking loves books like a weird amount it was definitely a weird amount; kid has parents who are academically inclined and also nerds who hand her lotsa books (love you mommy and daddy); kid reads 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea like five times (kid later gets really invested in the eel pit tiktok saga); kid gets really into dystopian fiction; kid gets some praise from teachers about great job on the writing Iz; kid internalizes it a little too much; kid writes bad poetry in high school; kid writes a lot of fanfiction at various phases of life including after she is an adult; kid halfheartedly wants to write a book; kid doesn’t write a book; kid gets a creative writing degree; kid spends ghastly amounts of time on the internet; kid thinks they’re going to write literary fiction maybe someday when she's a real adult; kid writes an ok creative writing thesis; kid goes to law school.

Anyway I actually thought I was going to be an oil painter for nineteen years of my life. Stop looking at me like that. You're all caught up now. Let’s talk about the short fiction.

part 2: the short story of it all

Before we get to the agent thing, we have to talk about the short fiction, because I was published first w/ my short fiction and getting “isabel good job!”’s for it before the novel/agent thing happened, and the agent thing was directly tied to the short fiction thing.

I only seriously started submitting short fiction in law school and it took me about two years to start getting published (this is…..not normal, but not…abnormal? I would say that you can accelerate that timeline by submitting more than two stories a year and also by not being in law school). It was kind of a passive activity until I started getting acceptances and then I realized, ah shit maybe this is something.

Also, to be clear, this was during 2020-2021 so I was kind of busy losing my mind over the acute phase of the pandemic and trying to get a job and so the writing thing was a slow burn until it was not a slow burn anymore and now its a whole thing.

If I had known where I would be in 2024, I might have taken my Writer Persona a little more seriously, but as it was, I started writing and being published while simultaneously doing fancy law guy in New York stuff, and I very much wanted to do writing FUN and NOT 4 SRS, I had enough SRS in my life. We'll see if I pivot away from txtspeak, but this is how we ended up with titles like "WHY DONT WE JUST KILL THE KID IN THE OMELAS HOLE" so maybe I learn the wrong lesson and simply continue.

I also mention the short fiction because I got my agent’s attention first because of the short fiction, and later I got my editor's attention from the short fiction thing, even though i did the traditional query thing as well. So for me, writing short fiction had very obvious career payoffs. We will talk about this in a later essay when we discuss The Seven Figure Book Deal of it all.

But you shouldn’t write short fiction because you want career payoffs. You're not me. Lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice. Whatever happens to you will be hopefully equally as beautiful and lifechanging, but it will probably not be the exact same thing. Staking your career on the concept of "going viral on the internet" is stupid. But staking your career on "writing a bunch of cool stuff" is probably less stupid.

You should write short fiction because it’s something you want to do, and because it’s a good place to test skills and riff on bigger ideas, and it's using a couple weeks or months of your life rather than a year to incubate some themes and concepts. Writing short fiction is not a prerequisite for writing a novel. But for me it was important. I like the genre. I like sketching out ideas quickly. I like creating strange little soap bubbles you can think about forever.

part 3: the quarter life crisis (how I wrote my first novel)

In fall 2021, I was very stressed about my new job (I’m an associate/biglaw atty in the corporate and securities group of Dechert LLP, doing leveraged finance at my firm), and my friend said I should do nanowrimo with him. He ended up NOT DOING IT, NIKHIL, DO YOUR NANOWRIMO ALREADY, but I did end up finishing my project even though it took way longer than a month.

I set out to write a novel based on an aborted short story that i had realized was a longer narrative (“that’ll be the right length, and i already have the idea so it will be an easier lift!”), and ended up with a very weird novel about time travel, the end of the world, and like, grief. This was the first draft of NOVEL #1, which took either four months or three years depending on how you count it.

By the end, writing NOVEL #1 had kind of turned into a weird spiritual quest or something. I wrote it feeling very much like “god. i feel so fucking incompetent at work. at least i can write this fucking book,” and “god. I’m already 25. I wanted to be an author but I’m 25 and it is TOO LATE for me and there are TEENAGERS getting agents and book deals and ok at least i can write ONE book this can be my PRACTICE book i’ll just do it and then ok it doesn’t matter whatever I do after at least it’ll be DONE.”

Yeah, feel free to laugh at me. NOVEL #1, despite not being my debut, did not end up being my practice book. It ended up getting me three offers of representation and my agent.

Caveat that I don't think it's realistic to expect to get an agent with your first novel, especially if it's the first work that you've finished. I think it's perfectly fine to use it to query, but the moment you finish your first novel...well, maybe give it a couple of months, but after that, start writing novel 2, because if novel 1 doesn't work out, then...time to send out novel 2! It’s best not to be precious about these things, and you gotta think about it like “every new draft is another bite of the apple.” I'm aware this is much easier for me to say from my lofty position of "I have an agent and book deals," but I do think that every new project gives you more of a level of polish that will help you professionally, and something I had to learn over the last ten years between my cw degree and all the publishing is that you can love what you make but you cannot be precious about it.

While NOVEL #1 was my first novel, I had been writing for years at this point, on the professional level (this also feels weird to say! but maybe its disingenuous to not say it since I have a wikipedia page and technically can call myself Award Winning Author Isabel J. Kim.), so the skills for NOVEL #1 were all things I had practiced. In a very real technical sense, writing short fiction gave me a lot of skill practice that I applied to NOVEL #1.

Also, I turned 26 and it was no big deal, and now I’m 28, which seemed like a lot a few years ago but I don't know why I was so dramatic about it (I’m putting all this shit about my own emotions in here because like, okay. writing a book is very hard. I think we should all acknowledge this. i think maybe it’s okay to acknowledge that sometimes you just write a book because you’re losing your mind and because you’re 25 and kind of a sadsack. i have opinions of where art comes from. sometimes art comes from being 25 and kind of a sadsack. it’s fine.)

I then edited NOVEL #1 with one big structural revision and one smaller narrative revision in mid 2022 and then I started getting my query list together.

Next time, let's talk query letters and logistics.